Saturday, 29 December 2012

I have a feeling that I might have mentioned narrative
ethics before, but in the light of a recent post on conflicting narratives in
wargaming, I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting.

As you probably recall, I suggested that a wargame, in terms
of what the participants are doing, was a trial of conflicting narrative with
mutually exclusive goals. That is, if I am playing a wargame against you, my
goal is that I win the game, and your goal is that you win it. It is very hard
to find situations where both of these outcomes obtain. Some scenario games may
approach it, as may some campaign games, but in most wargames there are winners
and losers, or, alternatively, a draw where neither outcomes have been
delivered.

It occurred to me that this might give another angle on the
issue of wargame ethics, or why we play some things and not others. The
evidence so far that I have found, or people have commented about, or I have
seen as games suggest that there are few wargame eras, even up to the fracas in
Afghanistan, which you will not find someone, somewhere, playing and producing
figures and rules for.

Similarly (or perhaps, oppositely), there are a good number
of people who will not play certain games, or eras or particular sides – the Germans
in World War Two is one such example. The have an ethical theory which will
cover both of these camps has turned out to be a bit tricky, to say the least.
None of the three main meta-ethical theories, virtue ethics, utilitarianism and
deontological, have proved to give us a particularly good handle on the ethics
of given historical wargames. As meta-ethical theories they cannot, in a
general sense, take account of individual tastes and viewpoint anyway.

The idea of a wargame being formed of conflicting narratives
does, however, give us a potential way in. As human beings we form ourselves,
at least to a large extent, by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves,
and those which we tell others. This is obviously trivial to some people, while
others need some convincing. However, we do like to tell stories, and many of
the stories are about ourselves, our values, our activities. As a minor
example, ‘how was your day’ requires some sort of story in reply, if the
question is not just to be dismissed as phatic speech.

The stories we tell ourselves, and tell of ourselves, arise
from the sets of values and processes which are imposed upon us by our culture,
society, education and personal life history. Again, this is reasonably obvious
in some senses. If I have lost a leg in an industrial accident, that is going
to inform my life story. If, like Roosevelt, I am disabled by childhood polio,
that too will inform my life story, even if I spend a lot of my time hiding the
fact of my disability from the general population.

Similarly, our society and culture can impact significantly
on our stories. For example, the question ‘did you vote?’ is a fairly neutral
one in most western liberal democracies, where voting is a right but not a
requirement. In an oppressive one party
state where a 100% turn out and vote for the party is expected, however, the
question takes on much nastier overtones, and our own personal responses to it
have a much greater impact, potentially, on our life stories.

How then do our own narratives of our lives in general
impact upon our wargaming choices and hence, on our wargaming ethics?

Wargaming (believe it or not) is not the whole of life, and
nor is it separated from the rest of our lives. Therefore, the wargaming
narratives that we tell can impact on the stories we tell more generally. If,
as I have suggested, our narratives of our lives represent to ourselves and to
the world ourselves, our virtues and vices, our outlooks and choices, then our
wargaming stories are going to represent something of those factors. Our
wargaming stories will impact on the rest of our lives, and we have to justify
them, at least to ourselves, somehow.

The give an example, suppose you have just been having a
wargame where the two sides are Russian partisans in World War Two and one of
those nasty SS rear area units whose job was to keep the partisans down. You
return home having won the game. ‘How did it go?’ asks your nearest and
dearest. ‘I won,’ you reply, ‘I shot thirty unarmed and surrendered partisans,
plundered and burnt the village and raped and murdered the women after killing
their children in front of them. Great game.’

You nearest and dearest may well, at this point, be reaching
for the phone to call an ambulance to take you to a psychiatric hospital. The
above scenario is not one that most of us want within our narratives. It is at
odds with most right thinking people’s views and, as such, we do not even wish
it to be included in a fictional part of our lives. It has no place in the
narratives of decent western liberal people.

The reasons why this sort of (even fictional) behaviour is
excluded from our narratives is an interesting and rather complex one. Clearly,
given that the sorts of events outlines above did happen and are a matter of
historical record means that that sort of behaviour is not outside the limits
of the possible. But we temper the possible by the sorts of things we wish to
represent to ourselves in our narratives, of which our wargaming activities are
a part.

This sort of approach dates back to Aristotle, of course. He
argued that the sorts of things that we do become habitual, and they can be
habitually virtuous or habitually vicious. If, then, we habitually cultivate
vicious behaviour, even at the level of the (imaginary) game described above,
Aristotle argues that we will, ourselves, become more vicious, and if we act
more virtuously, we will become more virtuous.

Therefore, I suggest that the wagames we feel uncomfortable
with are those where we undertake behaviour that we would not feel comfortable
with in the narratives of our whole lives. And that, it seems to me, is an
issue which is, in the final analysis, a personal one.

Saturday, 22 December 2012

It is traditional on this blog (where tradition means I have
done this twice) to have a shorter and lighter post the week before Christmas.
That being this week, I have decided to put everyone who has been reading my
terrain troubles posts out of their misery, or, at least, prove that I have
tried to tackle the problem.

For those who have missed it, the trouble with wargame
terrain is that it needs to be functional, aesthetically pleasing, match the
scales of both the figures and the rules, and be, at least for those of us who
do not have a permanent set up, easy to put together and to take apart.

That is quite a tall order.

Over the last few months I have been working to update and
upgrade my scenery and the results are in two crummy pictures below. The first is the first Fuzigore battlefield
from the south.

The second is the same from the north.

The trees are by Irregular (I have had them for years, just
not based them until now), the hovel building is from Baccus (who no longer makes them), the
roundhouses by Timecast. The wood, settlement and road bases are by me, from
bits of thin craft foam, which has worked surprisingly well. Of course, the
road is Roman, and so straight, which helped…

All in all, I think that this is an honourable conclusion to
the terrain thing. The battlefield took less than ten minutes to set up and
less than five to put away, it looks reasonable and to scale with the figures and
ground scale of the rules, the edges of the features are well defined by the
foam and it looks the part, to me anyway (you will have to believe me; photography is not my thing either).

Now, posts to this blog are usually about 1000 words long. A
picture, they say, is worth 1000 words. I have two pictures here, so this
post is way over length already, plus the fact that I have 30 casualty bases to
finish, another 15 to paint, plus 10 bases of civilians, four ox carts and a
pile of pack mules of unknown height before I can actually wargame this battle.

So I shall just wish you all a happy Christmas, and get my
brushes out again.

Saturday, 15 December 2012

I have written a fair bit about terrain, and how I can try
to make the terrain items on my table match both the figure scale and the
ground scale of the rules. Sitting making and painting the said terrain items
has given me a bit of time to ponder the importance of the terrain for the
wargame. In short, the question is ‘what is the impact on the game of the
terrain?’

Now, as I noted before, terrain items work at various
different levels within a wargame. In a historical setting (or, I suppose, a
pseudo-historical setting, like Fuzigore) the items are added to lend some
verisimilitude to the wargame. The buildings are expected to look like the ‘real
thing’, and so I have been painting roundhouses and granaries rather than
getting on with figure painting. Of course, the problem of the scale and size
of the buildings rears its head here, but there are work around to it.

In a purely historical battle, of course, the terrain needs
to match, as closely as possible, the original battle terrain. At a show a few
years ago there was a demonstration game of the battle of Lutzen. The features
of the battlefield of Lutzen included the town and castle of Lutzen itself, on
the Swedish left, and a hill crowned by windmills, facing the Swedish left. The demonstration had a good number of nicely
painted 25 mm (or so) figures, but of towns and windmills I could see no sign.

To what extent, then, was this demonstration game a depiction
of the battle of Lutzen? I do not want to pick on it specifically, but the
terrain did not, in my view, reflect the original battlefield. I suppose that
seven windmills in 25 mm might well have over-dominated the landscape, but one
or two, even scaled down mills would have made it more like Lutzen than not. I
confess that, without the display panels giving the history of the battle, I
would have assumed that it was just some English Civil War skirmish.

The next thing the terrain is supposed to do is, of course,
add some aesthetic value to the battlefield. This is actually rather hard to
achieve within the limits of what we use wargame terrain for, because, with the
exception of demonstration game terrain, we want our terrain items to be
flexible.

One of the hallmarks of most wargaming, I think, is that it
does not consist purely of model railway type terrain, beautifully done and
hand crafted for individual battles. In Fuzigore, for example, I hope that
there will be many wargames, and those terrain objects I am slaving over at the
moment will be reused many times. Therefore, they have to have an inherent flexibility
to allow for that reuse.

To give an example, I could create (at least in theory, my
artistic abilities are sadly limited) for the next battle, two
carefully crafted Celtic settlements with additional trees, fields and whatnot.
This would be fine for this particular battlefield, which is set in rolling
agricultural countryside. But what about the next battle, which could be in
hill country where the fields may not exist because the agriculture is
pastoral?

In short, most items of wargame terrain need to have a trade-off
between specificity, by which I mean that I want roundhouses for my Celts, and generalizability,
by which I mean I do not want to have to buy and paint more roundhouses every
time the battle is in a slightly different terrain.

Aside from all that, the terrain also has to be governed by
the rule set. By this I mean that the items of terrain used on the table have
to conform, in some way, to the way the rules say they need to. For example, in
at least some of the Polemos rule sets, the size of terrain items is (in
principle) governed by the base size adopted for the troops. A village has to
be 30 mm by 60 mm if the basing of the units is so. This, of course, makes
thing easy in judging whether a unit can hide in the village, but actually
imposes a set of limitations on the terrain item itself.

Of course, the usual route to overcome this is to have the
terrain mounted on a base and the base placed within a holder, so the whole
thing can be modelled without irritating straight edges. In this way the visual
aspect of the terrain item and the instrumental use of it within the rules are,
in some way, both met.

However, the rules are imposing the constraints on the
modelling. In many cases, this is not a problem. After all, in Fuzigore I can
simply decree that all villages, fields, woods and so on are a certain size,
due to, say, ritual requirements. In
modelling real life battlefields this may not be so easy. To return to my
Lutzen example, how many troops, in terms of bases, could hide in 300 houses
and a castle? The answer, I guess, is a fair number, although in the battle
itself they did not do so.

The upshot of this, I think, is that our wargame terrain has
to cover two bases. The first is the aesthetic. It has to look right, in other
words. The second is the functional. For example, to make line of sight rules
work, we need woods with a sharp cut off. Real woods do not necessarily come to
a stop at a defined edge, but our wargame ones must.

Finally, we need to pick out those aspects of terrain which
make a historical battle “this” battle. Can a reconstruction as a game of
Lutzen be Lutzen without the town and the windmills? These items did not have
any particular impact on the battle, although I think the windmills were set on
fire, as was the town, which did cause the Swedes some difficulty. But if these
items were not represented (we could, after all, just make Bernard’s command
job more difficult) are we still refighting Lutzen?

Saturday, 8 December 2012

One of the things I try to do from time to time here is to
attempt to answer the question ‘what is it that we are doing when we are
wargaming?’ Of course, there are many answers to that question which cover
things as diverse as ethics, statistics, historiography and speech-acts, and
some of these have been discussed.

This time, however, I would like to take a slightly broader
idea: what exactly is a war game? How does it function?

The idea I have is that a game, in general, is a conflict of
two narrative, one from each player. Now, I know that there are games which
have a single player (I am, after all, mainly a solo wargamer), but even so I
think there are two conflicting narratives at the heart of the process. Of
course, there could be more than two, with multi-player games where the players
have varying objectives, but I will leave that complication aside for the
moment.

Consider a different game, say tennis. Now, the objectives
in tennis are quite clear. Both players want to win the game. If one of them,
does not, it is not, strictly, a game of tennis; it is a knock about, or
practice, or training, but not a competitive game. In the case that both
players do want to win, each player has a narrative end in mind: me as the winner.
Both make such moves as they are capable of in such a way as to achieve the
objective of their narrative. So the game proceeds via serves and return,
volleys and so on, with each player attempting to obtain an advantage for their
own particular narrative. Eventually, one player, and one narrative will be
victorious.

He other issue within such a game is, of course, the
constraints imposed on the players, and their narratives, by the rules. The
rules ensure some degree of ‘fairness’. Now, we have to be a bit careful here.
Rules do not ensure absolute fairness: some people are better at tennis than
others. That, after all, is something of the point of the game. The rules do,
however, constrain the moves the players can make, so they are equivalent. Both
players, for example make serves, and, roughly speaking, make equal numbers of
serves with equal chances, given the individual’s ability, to score points.

The rules, then, constrain the possibilities of the game.
For example, I read somewhere recently that even an omnipotent, omniscient God
cannot win a game of chess against Gary Kasparov if all God has is the king and
a pawn. This is not any failure of omnipotence or omniscience, but simply that,
within the constraints of the rules of the game, no winning strategy exists for
God. Of course, God could cause Gary to become confused, make foolish moves and
so on, but that is outwith the game rules (and even so may not enable God to
win, as it happens).

With respect to wargaming, therefore, the idea is something
like this. The two players have conflicting narrative aims, that is, both side
wish to win. The process of them winning is decided by the players, how they
deploy their toy soldiers, the terrain of the wargame table and the moves they
make. These factors are the ones which, broadly speaking, are up to the
wargamers themselves. These are the items which the wargamers manipulate to
achieve the victory of their own narrative.

There are other factors. We have already noted the effect of
rules in constraining the moves that the players can make. It may be, for
example, that one player lands up in a similar position to that of God in my
chess example. There is no good winning strategy for him, and so his narrative
goal has to change from winning, to minimising the damage, or inflicting
disproportionate damage on the enemy, or delaying him, or whatever. The
scenario possibilities are, of course, endless.

Additional to all these fairly predictable issues there is
also a degree of randomness involved in the game, arbitrating, at least in
part, between the different narratives. The randomness is not, of course, absolute,
it occurs within the game. In most wargames, anyway, troops do not appear
suddenly in the middle of the battlefield as a result of a random throw of the
dice. Their combat may be more or less effective, but the impact of the
randomness is constrained by the rules themselves.

Sitting behind all this is, of course, the expectation that
the events on a wargame table will be reasonable and, at least in part,
rationally understandable. To link back to the idea of conflicting narratives,
we do expect a narrative to unfold in a reasonably linear fashion. This may
not, of course, happen in real modern novels, for example, where authors like
to try to mess with time and space to show how clever they are, but most
popular stories are reasonably linear in time (think Harry Potter, for
example).

Not only do we expect linear time, of at least clear cause
and effect, we expect that our blocks of toy soldiers will behave, in some fashion
at least, like blocks of real soldiers, and if, as seems likely, we are not
sure how a block of real soldiers might have behaved, we expect a degree of
intelligibility in the behaviour that they do display. Thus our rules have to
allow for reasonable behaviour, albeit
moderated by a constrained degree of randomness.

Of course, the ultimate aim of any wargame, indeed, most
games, is to ‘win’, whatever that might mean within the context. Winning, in a
campaign game will likely be very different from winning a tournament game. In
the former there may (and probably will) be a requirement to keep a force in
being, leading to less in the way of gambits and more in the way of conservative
and solid tactics. In the latter, the aim is to win, pure and simple, with
little regard for an overall situation, because there isn’t one.

Overall,, however, the aim of each player is, given the
constraints, to obtain the possession of the dominant narrative and win. If
nothing else, this is an unusual way of looking at wargaming.

Saturday, 1 December 2012

It is a truism, but a correct one, that all projects are
eighty per cent finished, eighty per cent of the time. Of those that are not,
some have just started, while the rest are ninety per cent complete, ninety per
cent of the time.

And so it is with wargame projects. There are possibly some
of you out there who are waiting with bated breath for the next update of the
Fuzigore saga. There may even be some who are waiting for the news of the ‘doubling
project’, my scheme to provide two Polemos sized armies for each force in the
rule book.

It is also possible that some of you might be waiting to see
what terrain I have conjured up in response to the ‘Terrain Troubles’ posts, or
(and I know that this is an extreme possibility) some who want to know when
Polemos: Polemos, the Greek, Persian and Macedonian wars rule set will be
published.

I concede that the last group will be minuscule.

I am pleased to say, however, that all of the above are, in
fact, about eighty per cent finished. Well, except the doubling project, of
course. And the rules.

The Fuzigore project has, however, proved to be much larger
than I expected. The reason for this is slightly interesting (to me, anyway,
and I'm the one that writes this stuff). In CS Grants book ‘Wargame Campaigns’ (1995,
CSG Publications: Pewsey) he has a bit on the forces which are needed for
campaign games. Now, obviously, this includes the normal army forces of
infantry, cavalry, artillery and so on. But then he lists the “less exciting
but equally essential” (p 24) extras that are needed to make an army function
on campaign.

These extras include such items as generals and couriers,
pioneers, supply convoys, artillery train, medical support units, river
transport, local defence forces and so on. These are the things that we can
safely ignore on the single battlefield, but are necessary to enable an army to
take to the field at all.

So, I have now completed another 20 base Gallic army, for
use in the Fuzigore battle that has been sitting on my shelf for the last
several weeks or, possibly months. I have also completed the terrain items that
go with the battle: some road sections, some woods, a couple of small
settlements. I would be posting a picture, but I thought I had charged the
battery on my digital camera, but the battery and the camera both disagreed.
Some other time, perhaps.

But now, here comes the rub: if you read the accounts of
battles during the periods with ‘barbarians’, you will notice that they had a
tendency to take their whole families along. Indeed, these families were those
support units which I have just outlined above – the medical support, the supply
convoys, and the resources for cooking and so on. They had a tendency to come
out of their camps to watch the battle as well, and, for example at the defeat
of Boudicca’s tribes, formed a distinct barrier to anyone trying to escape the
carnage, as well as being involved in it themselves.

This is not purely an ancient thing, either. We read of
Irish (or, more likely, Welsh speaking) women being massacred in the Royalist
camp after the battle of Naseby. Spike Milligan refers to Goums bringing their wives
along in ‘Rommel? Gunner who?’. Milligan is surprised, but it is an ancient and
well known practice. I suppose it is only with the professionalization of
armies that this practice stopped.

Baggage, in its widest form, is not well served by wargames.
Occasionally you might get a scenario which involves the convoying in of relief
supplies to an isolated fort, but other than that the train gets rather short
shrift. You do get odd bits and pieces about how many carts and pack animals an
army of a certain size might need, but that is usually as far as it goes. The
DB* rules, as I recall, do have provision for having camps or baggage, but they
do seem, to me at least, a bit small.

So this is where the Fuzigore, and indeed, the doubling
project is stalled at the moment. I have all the wargame figures, in terms of units
and bases that I need. But I do not have the ox carts, civilians, pack mules
and assorted detritus goes along with the army.

Now, you might say that I am overly picky, and you may well
be right, but I am trying to do this battle in a way that is satisfying to me.
The armies, on the grand tactical map, have baggage units, and so some of them
at least should be deployed on the table. The point is that if an army is separated from
its baggage, that army is going to struggle to function. While this has not
happened during the map moves, it is a distinct possibility that it will occur
during a battle.

Losing the baggage train is a more serious occurrence for a
campaign game, I think, than for a one off battle. In a one off battle rules
have to be invented as to why the baggage should not be used as a lure, abandoned,
allowed to be over run and so on. In a campaign, when you think of all the
goods and services the train supplies, the protection of it should be an
obvious necessity of the army commanders, and the loss of it a near total
disaster.

So here I am again, banging the drum for campaign games and,
having done so, stalled my own wargaming until the point that I have
appropriate baggage elements for both sides. In mitigation I can only say that
the baggage will, at least, be transferable between different armies; a Roman pack
mule is similar enough to a German or Gallic one not to be a problem.

Saturday, 24 November 2012

Ah, I hear my loyal reader think, this is about modern
wargames. That pre-1700 curmudgeon has finally seen the light and is about to
launch forth on the SAS, asymmetric wargaming and all the jolly technology that
gets modern (did someone mutter ‘ultra-modern’?) wagaming its good, or bad,
name, depending on how you look at it.

In fact, that is not the case. I am as unreconstructed as
ever, especially after my experiment last week with baking spelt bread. Spelt,
in case you were not aware (as I was not until a few weeks ago) is an ancient
grain that was grown in Britain (among other places) in the later Iron Age. The
good thing about it, from my point of view, is that the gluten is fragile, so
it does not need much kneading, which is great for lazy bakers like me. On the
other hand, it does not do well in the bread maker, so it is all hand labour.

Spelt produces a dense (or perhaps that is my kneading),
slightly nutty loaf which is nice for a change but will not, I think, become
part of our staple diet. However, Mrs P, who is a seed biochemist by origin,
did remark as we were trying to track down what sort of grain spelt is, ‘Now,
at last, you are doing something interesting.’

But I digress, probably because I am trying to avoid writing
about the subject, which I know a little about but not really enough to spout
confidently. The subject is modernity, and how it has influenced wargaming, so
with some trepidation, here goes.

The first problem, of course, is to define ‘modernity’
anyway. It is one of those things, I think, which we all know when we see it,
but it impossible to nail down. It is the train of thought that started during
the later medieval period, got going in the seventeenth century with the birth
of the natural sciences, and reached its peak, perhaps, with the Enlightenment
of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It then proceeded,
fairly happily, through the twentieth century until sometime, say, in the
nineteen eighties, when some of its certainties started to fracture under
criticism from, for example, feminists, ecological activists and some French
thinkers like Derrida.

It is probably true to say that, whether we acknowledge it
or not, all the readers of this blog, along with its writer, are children of
modernism. Its way of thinking is deeply ingrained in us. We do analysis,
reductionism, and, when we have reduced something complex to its components, we
categorize them. Things get nailed down, become mathematical in nature. Indeed,
one of the themes, it seems to me, anyway, of modern philosophy is its attempt,
from Descartes through to Kant and Whitehead, to nail philosophy as tightly as
mathematics had nailed physics.

Obviously, modernity has had profound effects on the way we
think and do things. For example, history has been moved from a basically
narrative viewpoint to one of themes and sweeps of history. Marxist analysis
(one of the upshots from modernity) has focussed historians attention on
economics, viewing historical actors as trapped in inevitable cycles of ‘progress’,
or of Hegelian ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ cycles. Historians want ‘facts’,
they want to be going through account sheets of early modern companies to
understand what was going on with the economics of the time.

How does this sort of thing affect wargaming? Well, I
suspect that you might be able to see where wargaming fits into this idea of
modernity. As wargamers, as rule writers and players, we categorize events and
armies. We start off with, perhaps, the idea of a cavalry army, or an infantry
army. We go from there and reduce our infantry to light, medium and heavy foot.
Each has different properties, depending on our understanding of our sources (whatever
they may be), our hunches, our mental models of what it means to be a medium
infantryman armed with a shield and spear.

In short, we subject our subjects to a thoroughgoing
modernist analysis, and insist, as a consequence, that our troops fit our
categories. We can see the effect of this in some rules and, perhaps most
particularly, in army lists. There we find, for example, Aztecs categorised in
a certain way, perhaps as ‘blades’ or ‘heavy foot’ or some such idea. In effect,
we have taken a modern category, say ‘tribal foot’ and imposed it on a different,
in the case of the Aztecs, totally alien, culture.

Fortunately, wargaming has never had to defend itself from
charges of imperialism and neo-colonialism, but I do suspect that this, at
heart, is what we are doing.

Of course, if we do not do this categorization, then perhaps
we would not be able to play a wargame at all. All we would have would be a
bewildering array of different troop types to find the capabilities of which we
would have to leaf through several large volumes of rules and army lists to
find an answer.

Actually, as I type this, it does start to remind me of some
rule sets I could name. However, many of them only do this because they have a
core system and blot on all the oddities like Aztecs and Samurai as additional
rules. I guess the charge of neo-colonialism still applies.

Other effects of modernity include the over reliance on
technology. I have lost count of the number of times I read in army lists words
to the effect of ‘these troops are recorded as having shields and so are
counted as superior’. Well, possibly, but perhaps they were issued with shields
to make them feel braver? Technology is not a single edged weapon.

Finally, one of the effects of modernity is to focus
attention on the individual. In this regard, human rights, for example, have
come to the fore, as they are individual rights, asserted against everyone
else. Wargaming, of course, started out with individual soldiers performing
acts of derring-do. It them went to something a bit more collective, perhaps,
with bases, but now a reaction has set in and old school wargaming is back,
proclaiming the power of the individual toy soldier.

Or may I am getting to postmodern for the good of my own
mental health.

Saturday, 17 November 2012

A comment from Aaron a bit ago has refreshed my memory as to
where my ponderings about the ethics of wargaming started. A long, long time
ago, Paddy Griffiths has a couple of articles in Lone Warrior which questioned
why some periods were simply not popular.

I cannot find my copies of those articles, but I vaguely remember
the arguments and upshot, which I will try to summarize below. Aaron’s point,
as I understood it, was that we self-select those wars which we do not wish to
game for ethical or taste reasons. If we can identify these wars, and the
reasons why they are not wargamed, then we might get what we might call an
empirical handle on wargame ethics.

Griffiths, as I recall, decided that there were three
categories of wargame which we do not play. The first were the boring games. In
this category he placed trench warfare on the western front in the First World
War, for example.

The second category were games which were far too one sided
to make a good game. Here, I believe he referred to a variety of colonial small
wars where a Stone Age technology tribe went up against a high firepower modern
army and, inevitably, lost.

The third category Griffith defined, I think, were games
that were too raw or political. By this, I think he meant wargames where some
of the participants may have more riding on the outcome that was realistic for
the game to manage. His examples of this were Elizabeth’s Irish Wars, where
anyone with an Irish background might take offence at the representation of
early colonialism, and, I think, he observed that an American Civil War wargame
could, at least in some parts of the United States, cause offence as well,
especially if the “wrong” side won.

Griffiths was writing a long time ago, sometime in the
mid-1970’s, I think, and it seems to me that his list of examples may not be
sustained today. Even as he wrote, Charlie Wesencraft was publishing ‘With Pike
and Musket: Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century Battles for the Wargamer’
(Elmfield: Morley, 1975). This included four scenarios from Elizabeth’s Irish
Wars out of twenty seven battles included. It has to be admitted that all except
one of the rest were English Civil War, but nevertheless it was a definite
indicator that someone, at least, did not find that war too politically hot to
handle.

So, can we update Griffiths’ lists of examples? To be
perfectly honest, I am finding this a bit of a struggle. Over the years since
he wrote many of the subjects he ruled as grey wargames have, in fact, been
played and, more often than not, become mainstream.

For example, First World War trench warfare is now
frequently seen; at least, I have seen a number of articles on the subject in
magazines, and also a few demonstration games at shows. I confess, it is not my
thing, but they do exist as games and presumably people play them. I suspect
that one of the things that makes the games playable is the design of decent
winnable scenarios, although the fact that the war and its carnage has faded
from living memory might help a bit too.

Again, with wargames that are deemed too one sided, sophisticated
scenario design can make a big difference. This, I suspect, is related to the
idea that the natives should stand up and fight like civilised people do – in ranks
like real men. They can then be mown down my western firepower, and the result,
of course, is a boring and one sided wargame. If the ‘native’ side is allowed
to use its own tactics, with a scenario of which the winning outcome is not the
standard wargame ‘annihilation of the opposing forces’, then an interesting and
(so far as a wargame ever can be) instructive battle can be had.

I suspect that this second category reflects on the type and
style or rules which were available then (and mostly still are today), where
the non-western forces are forced into categories of western troops into which
they do not really fit. The ‘Skulking Way of War’, to quote early North
American settlers about the aboriginals, did not fit into the rules of war at
the time, nor does it fit easily into our wargame concepts today. The upshot
was that the colonists went and destroyed native villages, leaving only death
and starvation, while our wargame forces do not really have a battle on their
hands.

The final category that Griffiths defined is more of a
moving target, I suspect. It is quite possible that a game based on Elizabeth’s
Irish Wars would not play well in, say Dublin, even today. I have been trying
to come up with a list of games that would today, fall into the ‘too
politically hot to handle’ camp, and I am not sure I can. If you can, please
let me know via the comments button!

Even so, I think that there probably are some currents in
contemporary wargaming where things just are not done. I suspect, for example,
that some things which were highly acceptable in the 1970’s might raise an
eyebrow or two today. For example, some colonial games may well have been
rebalanced, or at least renamed as such titles as ‘The Indian Mutiny’ may well
be deemed to be inappropriate. For that matter I vaguely recall an episode of ‘It
Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ where the events of that war had to be rapidly re-invented
when an Indian politician came to visit.

I do not seem to be getting very far along this track,
however. I cannot think of any particular period that wargamers in general
avoid. Perhaps that is a sign of the times, or perhaps it is counter-cultural,
in that wargamers, qua historians, at least accept that battles happened, they
were not pleasant and someone often won. Maybe, our politically correct
historical narratives cannot bear those unpleasant truths today.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

Those few of you who purchased a copy of Polemos: SPQR may
have noted the demise of the term ‘warband’, much loved of players of DBA, DBM
and, for all I know, various other rules. In the descriptions of the different
troop types I actually offer no explanation of why I have described what other
rules might call warbands as ‘tribal infantry’ or ‘tribal foot’.

Firstly, of course, there was the desire to be different.
The term warband had passed into wargaming language and would be freighted with
certain expectations which I was by no means certain the rules would deliver.
So some change in the language seemed to be required.

Secondly, my reading suggested that the expression warband
should, perhaps, be reserved for the immediately available following of a chief
or leader. These would be the ‘comitatus’ or noble’s retinue. According to
Tacitus, the power of a noble would be displayed by the size of his comitatus,
at least for the Germans, and these would be the men who rode out on raids and so
on, so would be better trained and equipped.

However, the bulk of the foot for big battles would not be
formed from the comitatus of the noble elite. Firstly, many of those men may
have been equipped as cavalry within an army, and secondly, even if they were
not, they would be likely to be the leaders of the rest of the foot. The rest
of the foot would, of course, consist of agricultural labourers, peasant
farmers and the like.

As Polemos: SPQR was designed to be a big battle rule set, I
decided that the term warband would be unhelpful, and renamed by foot of the
northern barbarians ‘tribal’.

Recently, I have read a very interesting paper, entitled ‘Detribalizing
the later prehistoric past: Concepts of tribes in Iron Age and Roman studies’
(T. Moore, Journal of Social Achaeology 11(3) 334-360 (2011)), which I happened
on by accident. In this paper Moore examines the idea of tribes in late
pre-Roman Britain. The conclusions do not bode well for my nomenclature.

Essentially, as I understand it, Moore argues that the first
sighting we have of tribes in Britain is during the second century AD. That is
both Tacitus and Ptolemy note certain tribes and locations within Britain which
they describe as ethnic and geographical entities. Thus, we get maps based on
Ptolemy of the tribal areas of Britain, with such stars as the Votadini in the
Scottish Borders and the Brigantines in the north.

The issue is, of course, that there is precious little
evidence for these tribes existing before the invasion by the Romans. While
Caesar encountered native forces, he does not really describe them as a
distinct tribe. Indeed, at one point he observes that there were four kings in
Kent (Conquest of Gaul V.22), an area usually described as belonging to the
Cantiaci alone.

There are also issues of translation hidden in these depths.
The texts of the authors of note here were often translated into English by men
during the nineteenth century. As such, they imported into the texts a number
of imperial and colonial concepts, such as tribe and state and nation. These
terms are interpretations of such words as ‘civitas’ and ‘gens’ and may not
have a one to one relationship with our concepts of their translations as ‘tribe’
or ‘people’. Confusion thus can abound.

Moore then goes on to suggest that, before contact with the
Romans, there was no such thing as a tribe in Britain, and that the tribes
described in the second century were formed by reaction to the invasion of the
country.

The narrative goes something like this: The first contact
was via long distance trade and gave the elite extra clout, as they were the
people obtaining the valuable trade goods. Thus the elite became more so. Then,
when the invasion happened, war leaders emerged who either were already the
elite, or became so. As the Romans occupied the country, they would deal with
the native elite only on terms that the Romans understood, that is, only by dealing
with a select few of native nobles who were held responsible for the behaviour
of the rest of those that the Romans defined as their responsibility.

The upshot of this, of course, is to argue that the tribes
of Britain were, effectively, Roman constructs, together with the cities which
are attributed to them. These were the places where the Roman administration decided
to administrate from, and the conquered peoples had to conform. Even in a
hostile colonial situation, there has to be some sort of contact between
conquered people and conquering forces, and this contact is conducted on the
terms of the conqueror.

This has a number of consequences for some of the ideas that are around of the continuity
of these tribes from pre-history through the Roman era to post-Roman kingdoms
and even, as has been claimed, to the
English county boundaries. The fact is that, even if continuity can be traced
from the Roman imposed ‘tribal’ system, the geographical boundaries cannot be
traced through a stable tribal system pre-dating the Romans. Such a thing
simply did not exist, and it is doubtful that the aboriginal Britons thought in
those terms anyway.

So, what does this have to do with wargaming?

Well, as I mentioned above, I renamed warbands as tribal
foot. Perhaps that term too is freighted with ignorance, and I should find some
other description. It has to be said, though, that ‘political entity imposed by
the Romans foot’ lacks a little as a snappy term for wargame rule use.

Aside from that, I think what this shows is that we need to
be very careful in terms of our assumptions about the political entities from
which our toy soldiers spring. Mostly, we have assumptions which, as the above
shows, are based on nineteenth century concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’
which may not fit the originals entities which they were designed for. History,
for those who care to look into it, is fraught with these sorts of
difficulties.

Saturday, 3 November 2012

I am sure that I have mentioned some of the work of Walter
Wink before, but he says much more than simply observations about the behaviour
of crowds. Wink is a theologian, but you do not have to buy into his
metaphysics in order to hear some of the things he has to say.

One of the interesting things Wink does talk about is the
issue of violence in our society, or at least in society in North America. He
starts from a Popeye cartoon. If you think of the standard narrative trajectory
of a Popeye cartoon, Popeye gets duffed up by an opponent, usually Bluto, and
Olive Oyl gets ‘stolen’, either kidnapped or willingly because Popeye has upset
her. After some futile efforts at rescue, Popeye ingests some spinach, defeats
his enemy in a major fight and recaptures Olive Oyl. Might and right have
triumphed.

Wink’s argument is that, in the case of Popeye, the violence
displayed is redemptive. Popeye is defeated by a baddie in the first instance,
and his efforts to win are unsuccessful until, with wit, guile and additional
strength, he returns to the foe and defeats him, much more decisively than
Popeye himself was originally defeated. The violence, then, not only restores
the status quo ante bellum, but has improved the situation. Olive Oyl is Popeye’s
girl again, practically worshipping him; the enemy is heavily defeated and
practically annihilated, certainly for all practical purposes no longer a
threat, but often an object of laughter and derision.

Wink traces this myth of redemptive violence though a number
of generations of US culture. He notes that, for example, Tom and Jerry cartoon
are inherently violent, and the remakes of them which attempted not to be were,
more or less failures. In film, he observes that many are violent, and uses,
for example, Rambo. Here, he argues, the myth is presented in a very clear
form. Rambo blows up and shoots practically everything in sight to make the
world a better place.

While Wink does not claim that the myth of redemptive
violence is the only strand in North American culture, he does suggest strongly
that it is pervasive in that society and thus, given the relative dominance of
US culture on the world stage, that it is influential across the world. He
notes links to other ideas in culture and warfare, such as the idea of “gunboat
diplomacy”, as well as frantic efforts by international agencies to ameliorate
or deflect the idea that shooting first and negotiating second is the correct
way to conduct international affairs.

Now, I imagine that you, gentle reader, are sitting there
and wondering what on earth this has to do with wargaming. If you have read
this far, take courage, for we are nearly there.

One of the aspects of the myth of redemptive violence is, I
think, that the violence often happens in a poorly defined context. For example,
one of Raymond Chandler’s novellas (called Red.. something, Thursday?), has, by
the end of the first page or so, a body count of startling proportions. The
point is that there is no context as to why this should need to be the case.
These are simply the enemy, the other, the baddies, while the point of view of
the narrator is the goodies side. (Of course, Chandler is a bit more subtle
than that, but I am not here indulging in literary criticism).

If Wink is correct in his assessment of the influence of the
myth, then we might be able to see one of the aspects of wargaming which makes
people uneasy in a new light. As was noted by a comment a while ago, context in
the history and historiography of warfare is everything. History (or historians
and their readers, anyway) judge wars as to whether they are justified or
not. A decontextualized war is a ‘bad’
war, an immoral war.

Most wargames, I suspect, are exactly decontextualized, even
if there is the opportunity to provide context. For example, most tournament or
competition games can have no context, for the sides never met on the field of
battle in history. The battle depicted, therefore, can have no meaning and, to
an outside observer, is simply violence (or rather, the abstract depiction of
violence) for the sake of it.

Even when some context is provided, for example in a
magazine article or a demonstration game, the context is, largely, that of the
campaign, armies, commanders and tactics. The even larger backdrop is not
given. Having perpetrated a few magazine articles, at least, in my time, I know
that an author cannot give the full meaning and context, and provide a summary
of the rest of the campaign and battles in the space provided. So inevitably
some sort of decontextualization is going to happen.

The upshot of this, of course, is that unless we provide a
huge book detailing the social, economic, political and military backdrop to
our battles, we have to ignore some of the context at least. And that, I
suspect, starts to makes us, or at least some observers, uncomfortable. The
decontextualisation of the implied violence makes us, as wargames, look like
schoolchildren taking irrational dislikes to others, picking on them and so on.
Warfare, in context, might be acceptable, wargaming looks too adolescent,
because the context is lacking.

Finally, Wink observes that violence is not redemptive. To
some extent historians accept this, focussing usually on how wars start and end
rather than how they are conducted (this is frustrating to wargamers, of
course). Violence breeds more violence. The victory at Agincourt led to Treaty
of Troyes, but that then led to a half century of further warfare as the
Dauphin tried to regain his birthright. Gunboats may achieve a certain amount,
but someone has to go in a clear up the mess afterwards.

Does this help us in our quest to find out why wargaming
might make us uncomfortable?

Perhaps a little. It shows that the ambivalence towards
violence is deeply seated in our society and that our sometimes simplistic approach
to it can be unsettling if we consider the implications.

Saturday, 27 October 2012

My grumbling about the problems of getting the correct
balance between figure and ground scale for terrain items a few weeks ago have
led me off down a slightly different path. I do, now, have something of a
solution to the original problem (of which more later) but the question which
was posed in my mind was:

‘What did the Gallic countryside look like anyway?’

This has turned out to be rather harder to discover than I
expected. I kind of expected to amble out into the electronic environment, or
at least the scholarly one, and be overwhelmed with studies explaining the
varieties and techniques of ancient farming and, at least, to be able to deduce
from those what the environment looked like, and how it could be represented on
the wargame table.

I have been disappointed. Perhaps I have been looking in the
wrong place, but I have not been able to find anything particularly useful,
certainly about Gaul. Of course, it is possibly because I am, after all, a
monoglot, and pre-Roman and Roman Gaul is not a major item of interest in
Anglo-Saxon parts, but it has to be said that even British agriculture of the
period is a bit of a stuggle.

I did find, however, one extremely useful web site, that of
Butser Iron Age Farm (http://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/).
This covers quite a lot of what I wanted to know, and a few bits and pieces in Peter
Salway’s ‘A History of Roman Britain have helped to flesh out some of the rest. That is not to
say that there is a definitive answer to the original question (how could there
be?), but there is probably sufficient to create a suitable wargame terrain.

Butser suggests that, at least in the south of Britain (and
hence, I hope, by extension, to France, agriculture was focussed on fields
around settlements. Depending on where you were, the settlements could be stockade
or not. It is not entirely clear if the stockades were for defence or to keep
grazing animals out of some areas.

The fields could be of wattle fencing or of live hedge, and
would be rather small. If you Google for ‘Celtic fields’ images, you will see a
large number of pictures of small fields in various parts of the country. These
suggest that field boundaries could be of banks and ditches, or of dry stone
walls. I suppose that local materials were used, whatever was available, pretty
much as they are today.

It would seem that quite large areas must have been under
arable cultivation, as the estimate of the area required to fill a storage pit
is about three and a half hectares, which is eight and two thirds acres, more
or less. Salway quotes the director of Butser as saying that the problem is
really to identify areas where there was no prehistoric agriculture, not where
there was.

That said, the Celtic fields do not seem to be sufficient to
supply the grain required by, say, an occupying Roman army, so the question of
where the major source of arable land was has to remain open. Outside the
enclosures around the settlements, however, animal ranching of sheep, goats,
cattle and horses was a major occupation.

Within the fields, a variety of grains were grown, spelt,
emmer, einkhorn, wheat and oats, barley and rye. The yields were not great, but
would probably have been sufficient for some trade for luxury goods.
Interestingly (or at least, it was to me) if you plough frequently
perpendicular to the slope of a field, the soil slowly settles in a downward
direction, giving you terraces, with a bigger one at the bottom. This is called
a ‘runrig’, although I would guess that most of you already knew that.

Interestingly, the advent of the Romans does not seem to
have disturbed this pattern too much. The Roman villas were generally placed to
be central to (and sometimes in higher places than) the native farmsteads, and
presumably served as the focus for the collection and storage of the produce.
Hence, and again this is probably only of interest to me, the French word ‘ville’
meaning town, and the English ‘village’.

So, in wargame terms, what should the countryside look like?

The terrain is probably reasonably heavily settled by,
effectively, small farming communities. There may be some local overlord,
either in a villa once Romanized, or a local hill fort or oppodia. I have not
been able to find out thus far if, in England, the diversity of settlement
shapes found in medieval times operated. I mean the fact that some villages in
England are focussed around a centre to keep the good arable land to a maximum,
while some are linear, with each plot having its own paddock, indicating a more
animal focussed farming. It is possible that this happened, but I am not at all
sure.

Outside the enclosed areas, the land would have been for
grazing and growing other crops such as timber. Wetlands would have been used
for water meadows and for growing willow, and of course hunting and fishing
would have been happening too. Orchards
would also have been kept, and grazed by pigs.

So, far from a largely unpopulated landscape, much beloved
of wargamers (who prefers to fight battles on a flat plain?), we are looking
here at a complex, heavily used countryside with a distinct stamp of the hand
of man.

So, now, my solution to my terrain problems:

I have decided that I need to roll with the problem of the
two scales. The areas of woods, settlements and fields will be marked out by
pieces of felt (or, hopefully, some nifty bits of thin foam stuff that I have
run across). These will be in the correct ground scale. The terrain items
(houses, fields, trees) will be the correct figure scale, but mounted on the
same bases as the figures (or double bases, to be exact; even roundhouses can
be quite big). They will, thus, be interchangeable with figures if the units
move into the areas of terrain.

I have nearly finished the first of my new tree bases, and
am pondering the enclosures. If I am happy with the results, I might even post
a picture here, but I would not hold your breath, because ‘nearly finished’ can still mean 'quite a long time off' in my world.

Saturday, 20 October 2012

It is a sad fact that I do not buy any wargame magazines any
more, I I suppose that asking the question ‘why’ is a reasonable one. After
all, in my time I have subscribed to a few, both mainstream and amateur, and
even contributed articles to both kinds.

So I suppose the question is: why did I stop?

I am not so naïve as to suppose that there is a single
reason for my ceasing to purchase such publications. Firstly, the price kept
going up. When a subscription to a magazine starts to look like the same price
as a decent sized army, then one has to look to one’s priorities. Nevertheless,
being reasonably happily employed means that price could not have been the
overbearing issue.

Another reason could be the range of articles in an issue of
a journal. The mainstream journals, in general, claim to try to keep a wide
spread of articles. As far as I can tell, not having done a major survey and
statistical analysis, the journal I mostly read always has a World war Two article,
usually a Napoleonic or Seven Years War one, often a modern one and, from time
to time, an ancients or medieval article. I suppose this was for a few reasons.

Firstly, the editors can only print articles that they have
to hand, so if no-one had sent in any ancients material, it could not be
printed. Secondly, the editors, presumably, know their market fairly well, and
the two most popular wargame periods are, so far as I know, precisely
Napoleonics and World War Two. So it is inevitable that the articles written
and published will be in there two areas, at least in the main.

Now again, I am not suggesting that this, either, is why I
stopped buying the magazines. I am, after all, a solo wargamer and quite
prepared to borrow good ideas from any period you might like to mention. If a
good mechanism is described in an article on, say, the Battle of Balaklava, and
it would work for my Romans, then I am absolutely not averse to using it.

It was not even the photographs of miniature figures that
stopped me buying the magazines. These, I suspect, are also linked to the issue
of which articles are printed, it is true, and could be of varying quality. However,
they were all better than the figures I can paint, so I am not going to
criticise, although some of the image manipulation just did not seem to work well
from my point of view. I also have to say that, having had a few articles
published, the editor’s decision about what formed suitable pictures to
accompany a given text sometimes seemed a little bit, um, interesting. But then
I am not an editor of a magazine, so who am I to criticise?

Finally, I did not stop buying wargame magazines because
they are, in general, opposed to 6 mm figures. I am not convinced, despite
recent issues, that they are, in particular, anti small figures, but I suspect
that the editors simply feel that, except perhaps for World War Two, such
figures are not mainstream and so fall outside what they want to publish. There
is also, I suspect, an increased difficulty in taking pictures to satisfy the
eye candy lobby who want to see the whites (and the pupils) of the figure’s
eyes. As I said above, if the text explains a nice rule mechanism or bit of
insight, it is still something I can
use. Furthermore, the nice colour pictures enabled Mrs P. to say “Oh,
those are nice”.

So, having explained why it is not that I have stopped
purchasing wargame magazines, I suppose that I should try to give some real
reasons. My real reason for stopping buying magazines was that I got bored and
irritated with them.

Magazine articles, I feel, fall into two types. Firstly,
there are re-hashes of battles that have been described many times before. I
finally despaired of historical articles on these ‘mainstream’ battles when I
read the third one in a few years on, I think, Neville’s Cross (1346). This was
a lengthy article but it essentially followed the description from, I think it
was, Oman. Now, a lot of work has happened between Oman’s time, (1920’s or so),
and now. I am not saying that Oman is useless, far from it, but he is not the
last word in the subject. At least one book has been published on the battle
recently, and a number of scholarly articles have been written, incorporating
sources of which Oman was unaware into the story of the campaign and battle.

Your response to that may well be ‘so what?’, but one of the
aspects of most historical wargamers is, I think, a wish to get the details
right. If you set up your figures in accordance with Oman’s description, you
will be fighting a nice medieval wargame, but it will not be Neville’s Cross.
So my problem with this is the very limited range of sources that most wargame
authors access. If you are going to write an article, base it on the latest
work you can access, not on near hundred year old accounts.

The second type of article is based on research, but is on
such an obscure wargame idea that you know, before you read it, that you are
never going to wargame it. For example, there was a very nice and lengthy set
of articles on the border wars in Thailand. I am sure that they were very
interesting to someone (presumably the author), but quite how many people were
inspired to follow suit I am not sure. There are few figures, books or other
resources to cover these periods, and the effort to find figures and other
items is greater than I, for one, am prepared to make.

So while mainstream battle articles tend to the predictable
and outdated, the obscure ones tend to suffer from a lack of resources. So, for
me, magazines became much less useful than they had, perhaps, once been. So I
stopped reading them.

Saturday, 13 October 2012

To summarize where I am at present in the ethics and
wargames debate: I am not sure I entirely understand what the question is. I
have proposed a number of positions, but I have found that none of them apply
strictly enough to wargaming to really give a decent handle on why wargaming
might be considered unethical.

A number of people have been kind enough to comment on the
issue. Firstly, it was suggested that perhaps using utilitarianism and Mill’s
harm principle was too broad. Mill argues that you can offend people, but if
you do it does not count as harming them. The problem is that some forms of
offence are counted, by many people, as being harmful, and so, practically, the
argument fails. I have tried to answer this criticism by switching meta-ethical
theory, and arguing from virtue ethics that wargaming armies from evil regimes
makes us more likely to be evil. I’m not convinced that this works any better,
but it is at least different.

Secondly, it was also suggested that ethical concerns are
simply a reflection of our (perhaps overly) politically correct culture. It is
certainly true that few people would have raised objections to wargaming a few
hundred years ago, but then few people had the time, money or leisure to
wargame. I reached a tentative conclusion that perhaps the ethical issue with
wargaming reflects a broader ambivalence to warfare in our society.

Finally, at least at time of writing, it was noted that
wargames are often played without context and without critical engagement with
the two sides. In effect, both sides in a wargame are treated as ethically
neutral, even though one may consist of an SS Panzer division. They are simply
tokens on the table which are used to create an narrative between the two adversaries.

To quote Phil Sabin, quoting Tim Cornell:

“The trouble precisely with wargames which take you back
into periods about which we know nothing, or very little, and cannot understand,
is that you do it in a moral vacuum. I don’t think wargaming is wicked in
itself, or that war is necessarily bad at all. I think there is a very strong moral
dimension and you’ve got to have good reason to engage in war, and this should
be reflected at the level of games too.”

Now, I know that this is a quote of a quote, and that the
context of this paragraph might well be something different, but I think there
are a number of things going on here.

Firstly, there is a very strong historical dimension to the
idea of wargaming presented here. The periods, it is argued, are ones about
which we know little and can know little. I am not entirely sure that the
statement is quite accurate, put as baldly as that. It does need some nuance:
historians can and do tell us a lot about many periods. We do not have to
operate in a historical vacuum, we can choose, for example, to examine the
origins of the English Civil War and decide for ourselves who was right and who
was wrong.

Of course, the problem with history is that it does tend to
move in fashions. With the ECW interpretations vary wildly, from neo-Marxist
arguments about the rise of the gentry to revisionist historians arguing that
the problem was really Charles I. With such variation in historical accounts,
even within the last 50 years or so, it is hardly surprising that wargamers do
not engage with this sort of historiography, but simply reach for the nearest
Osprey and call that research.

Nevertheless, it is possible to contextualise our table-top
armies, and perhaps it is a moral requirement of them that we do so. We can
then wargame SS divisions knowing full well what they stood for in the broader
context. I do wonder, however, if that should mitigate our pleasure when we
win.

The second thing that is going on in the quoted paragraph
is, of course, a projection of our moral dilemma, in a liberal, western
democracy, over the use of force. There
is a moral dimension, and, it argues, we have to reflect that in a wargame.
This is an interesting point, as it indicates an issue that I have touched
on in the past, and rather dismissed as
not being very helpful.

The issue is that of the western tradition of the just war. This
arose from the Judaeo-Christian context, and is still much debated today. For
example, most theorists consider the first Iraq war to have been a reasonably
just one, but considerable doubts have been raised about the second, as I’m
sure most people are aware. Governments are accused of fixing the evidence and
ignoring the precepts of the just war tradition.

Nevertheless, the just war does give us a yardstick to
measure the justice of a given conflict against. The problem I have with it is
transferring that from the real world (where it is usually an ideal but never
fully implemented) to the wargame table.

To see the problem, let us transfer back to the World War
Two example of, say, a US Marine company against an SS Panzer Grenadier one.
Clearly, we have a moral context here. One side, most people would agree, are
the goodies, and the other are the baddies. According to the just war argument,
the baddies should simply surrender, or at least, not fight hard in a bad
cause, or even deliberately lose to increase the justice in the world.

As I’m sure you can see this lands us up with no wargame at
all.

So yes, I’m all for context, and I think it is vital that
someone wargaming world war two Germans knows the context in which they are
wargaming. I also think that such a person should undertake a critical look at
what their army prototype stood for, and carefully differentiate themselves
from that political position.

The problems is, so far as I can tell, knowing when to stop,
so that there still exists the opportunity of having a wargame at all.

Saturday, 6 October 2012

Ruaridh asked recently whether wargaming would have been
regarded as even ethically questionable in past ages. The short answer is, of course,
that I have no idea. On a more considered reflection, however, I might be able
to offer some tentative suggestions.

Firstly, there has always been a strand of peace, and
yearning for peace, in our culture. A recent book, called “The Glorious Art of
Peace” by John Gittings ((2012) Oxford: OUP) examines some of these aspects, as
the subtitle says, ‘from the Iliad to Iraq’.

Gittings is not interested in wargaming, of course, but he
does point out that in almost all cultures, peace has been an ideal,
particularly as it is often associated with prosperity for the peasant farmers,
who could and did lose everything when land was despoiled during campaigns.

An interesting start is to be made in, in fact, the Iliad.
Here, Gittings argues that while about a third of the poem is devoted to battle
scenes, many of them gory, Homer does not give unequivocal backing to the idea
that war is a good thing. For example, the exploits of the heroes, their
blessings in their own country, exploits, wives and families are often given;
and then they die, gruesomely in most cases. Heroes, even in Homer, are not
bomb (or even spear) proof.

A second Homeric item is the shield of Achilles, which was
decorated with scenes of both peace and war. Gittings suggests that Homer is
arguing that peace is the true aspiration of the human race; that what we
really want to do is eat, drink and make merry, but the cares of the world
(including warfare) often, if not usually interfere, and even the noble and
heroic are not immune.

So, even as far back as the Iliad, peace and war are
juxtaposed, in tension, and not to be accepted at face value. Of course, that
is not how the text has necessarily been treated down the centuries. Alexander
the “Great” is said to have slept on it on campaign, and it influenced
generations of Greek and Roman scholars, poets and authors.

It is not just the Greeks, or the western tradition which
has put forth this ambiguous view of warfare. In China the literature from the Warring
States era also presents a less than fulsome picture of warfare. Gittings
multiplies his examples from history, but the point remains: war has never been
a straightforward issue.

It can hardly be a surprise, then, if wargaming has its
ambiguities. If, as it does, our culture has a tense relationship with war,
then a hobby which represents war cannot be without its own issues. What they
are, exactly, is of course more difficult to define, as some of the posts on
this blog have demonstrated.

So, when did wargaming acquire the status of being something
polite society did not mention?

I am not sure, as I said, that I can really answer that
question. However, we can, I think, see that it is linked with the rise of
leisure time in the West. Speaking very broadly, before the Victorian era,
(late 19th century) few people would have had the leisure to indulge
in wargaming, and if they did, there was not much in the way of equipment to
assist them. Of course, there are a few exceptions among the super-rich, and
the Prussian army started to use wargames for professional reasons during the
same century. However, it is Robert Louis Stevenson and H G Wells who start
wargaming as a leisure practice in the late 19th and early 20th
century.

Before the first world war there were, I think, two things
going on. Firstly, there was a good deal of nationalism, jingoism if you will.
This led, for example, to the Prince of Wales storming out of the first night
of Shaw’s ‘Arms and the Man’ when one of the actors inadvertently referred to
the ‘British Army’ rather than the ‘Bulgarian Army’ running away. Even after
the Boer war (and even, perhaps, particularly after the Boer war) the British
army simply did not do that.

Secondly, there was what HG Wells called a lot of “whoosh”
going on. Certainly from the point of view of the British (and probably US)
middle classes, things were getting a lot better and were going to continue
doing so. The British authorities were
shocked, for example, to find how many young men from poor areas were unfit for
war service due to ill health and poor nourishment. The society which was so forward looking was
found to be mired in poverty.

Similarly, although revisionist historians have had a good
go at this, the battles of the first world war were a profound shock,
particularly as the Pals battalions were mown down and the war poets started to
write (OK, not all of them, but Sassoon and Owen, at least). Now the view from
1918 or 1919 was that the allies had won, but the cost had been horrific. Peace
movements (League of Nations, Peace Pledge Union and so on) grew and peaked
during the 1920’s and 1930’s.

So I submit that, sometime around the end of World War One,
wargaming (which was in its infancy) probably ran into ethical issues. Why, you
can imagine people asking, would you want to wargame with the recent war to end
all wars so vivid and awful in memory; when there are so many widows and unmarried
women around because the death toll was so high?

I guess that this sort of question, which is akin to the
ones Ruaridh was asked, are the ones that continue to dog the hobby to this
day. On the one hand there are good reasons to wargame: to remember, to
understand, to investigate what happened and why. On the other hand, there are
the reasons not to wargame: it revisits the horror and pain, even vicariously.

So it could be the ‘wargame ethics’ debates we are having
here are, in fact, related to our society’s ambiguous relationship with
warfare, and that neither war nor wargaming have ever not had these issues
hanging around the margins.

Saturday, 29 September 2012

I suspect that I may be flogging a dead horse, or at least
boring most of the readers of this blog (that would be both of them….) but I am
still pondering the reasons why some argue that only modern warfare (more or
less from World War Two onwards) is subject to some degree of angst from some
members, at least, of the wargame fraternity, while other periods are not.

I think I have sufficiently argued that, at least from a
utilitarian point of view, the issue is not an issue at all; it is simply a
matter of giving or receiving offence, which is not an ethical issue.

So, is there an alternative point of view from which the
wargaming of World War Two Germans could be argued as being problematic? I
think there might be, and so I shall try to describe what it is, in my view at
least, here.

The underlying issue seems to be this: we become what we do
habitually. This is an argument or claim that, in fact, goes back to Aristotle.
It suggests that, in order to become virtuous, and to live the good life, we
have to practice. So, for example, if we habitually rob banks, our lives are
unlikely to be virtuous ones. On the other hand, if we habitually go and work
in a charity shelter, our lives are, at least in theory going to be virtuous
ones, at least if we do not combine the two.

In this idea, I suspect, lies the problem that makes people
uneasy, or at least feel they have to justify themselves, while wargaming WWII
Germans. The idea is that by habitually wargaming WWII Germans, we might become
like them.

I suppose the first question to tackle is why the Germans
and not, say, the Assyrians or Babylonians, or even the Romans, all of whose
track records when it comes to modern human right is dubious, to say the least.
Wargaming Romans, even campaigns like the Spartacus slave revolt, does not seem
to fill us with the same angst as, say, the Korsun pocket. Why not?

I think the answer to this one lies within our ability to
identify with some fictional characters. We cannot, I suggest, really identify
with characters from the Roman Empire. Their world view was simply too
different to ours for us to manage that. While there is much decent material
out there on the Romans, it just does not help us to identify ourselves with
the world view, but simply makes it alien.

While literature and film can also take us to this other
world, often the concepts and themes tied up in it are simply our own. The same
is true of science fiction, of course. Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is, at
least in part, a response to Vietnam, while Miller’s A Canticle to Leibowitz is
a response to World War Two. Similarly, without wishing to push things too far,
Rosemary Sutcliffe’s A Sword at Sunset could be interpreted as focussed around
the end of the British Empire. The contemporary issues behind Gladiator and 300
are left to the reader.

The difference between the nasty empires of the past and
that of Nazi Germany is a matter of memory. We cannot remember the atrocities
carried out by, say, the Romans when the crucified revolted slaves every few
hundred yards along a road. We cannot have known these people, and while we can
have pity on them, it is a bit hard really to empathise; this may be in part
because the Romans who did the crucifixions also wrote the history recording
them.

With the Nazi regime, of course, things are different. It
was a system that obsessively recorded things. The names and even faces of
those slaughtered are available to us should we choose to find them. There are
tours to places to Auschwitz, where the horrors took place, and there is
scholarly analysis of why it happened, the mind sets which enabled people to
follow orders and permit, without question, unimaginable awfulness.

The difficulty, then, in terms of wargaming Nazi Germany, is
that we too live in a system which is not wildly dissimilar. While I am sure
that no western style democracy is headed in that direction, Nazi Germany is
close enough to us to permit us to imagine that it could. In short, we can much
more easily identify with the people on the ground, receiving orders that they
either execute or get executed themselves. This places the moral question
directly before us: what would you have done?

A second issue here is, I suspect, that World War Two is a
highly charged political issue. Even writing about it here, in wargame terms,
makes me feel a little jumpy, wondering who I might upset, or whether I am
going to be lambasted by some secret Nazi sympathiser. The fact that this is
unlikely is neither here nor there; the issue is highly charged and sensitive,
and we, as wargamers, have to live with that.

So, what advice could we give to someone who is interested
in wargaming World War Two Germans but worried that they might upset people, of
be morally compromised?

From the utilitarian point of view, the answer is ‘it is not
a problem’. However, from the virtue ethics side, these is an issue of some
description.

The advice, therefore, would be along the lines of:

Remember always that, no matter how heroic, innovative or
how cool the uniforms, these toy soldiers are representative of an utterly evil
regime. It is perfectly legitimate to wargame with them, but always remember,
when reading and thinking about them, that the politics and actions of many
leading the regime and the orders they issued and enforced have no place in any
society at all.

I suppose that, as I suggested before, the major danger of
wargaming World War Two Germans is that of running across Nazi apologia in
books, not representing battlefield occurences.

Saturday, 22 September 2012

As some of you may be aware, I am running a (solo) campaign in
a fictionalised Europe of the Roman era. It is fictionalised because I want to
use both Late Republican and Early Empire troops. If you are not aware of this,
you can find out by hitting the ‘Fuzigore’ posts on the blog, but I doubt if it
will make much difference to what is below.

In Fuzigore, I have recently arrived at my first battle. I
did this ‘properly’ for want of a better word. The movement of the two armies
was plotted on hex paper, using a map I copied from an old road atlas of
France. The protagonists are, of course, two tribes in my country of Cillag,
who are the real world equivalents of Gauls.

Those of you with good memories will realise from the above
that I must have finished painting the second Polemos army of said Gauls, which
is quite correct. I have also finished eight half bases of civilians (my noble
role playing character Ocram is with one of the armies as a civilian observer).
This is the end (more or less) of the first phase of my ‘doubling’ project,
which aims to provide tow each of the listed Polemos armies. This arises
because, of any given nation in the time of the Romans, the answer to the
question ‘Who did they fight most?’ is usually ‘Themselves’.

But I digress.

I have decided to try to do the terrain in a decent manner,
not least because I would like a photo-record of the battles for my war diary.
The armies are now in contact, in the real world a bit south of La Rochelle.
The battlefield is fairly open with a few woods and two settlements.

Here, my troubles with terrain begin.

The settlements are not, in truth, too much of a problem. I
have some old Baccus hovels which are already painted, so basing them up and
making them look pretty, or at least similar to the bases of the soldiers is
not a major problem. I did toy with the idea of making roundhouses out of card,
but found it is very hard to make a card roundhouse round, so my citizens of
Cillag will have to be content with longhouses.

The woods do not present too much of a problem, although I am
thinking of making the sort of ‘roof wood’ that is described in the DBA rules,
which consists of a base, some stalks to support the roof, and a roof with
lichen on it to show the wood itself. I might; I will see how time goes.

The real problem I hit, however, was the enclosures.

Now, the issue is not materials. Over the years I have
collected a fair bit of hedging in 6 mm scale. In fact, I discovered an
alarming quantity of hedges in my terrain box, and so I happily sat down to consider
how to use it. It came in single hedges of about four inches in length, and it
is here that I hit a problem.

A 100 mm strip of hedge is, in 6 mm scale, 100 feet long.
That is fine, and so a square of these hedge strips would constitute a
reasonably sized ancient field.

However, in the ground scale of the rules, 40 mm is 200
paces, or, put another way, 10 mm is 50 paces and so 100 mm is 500 paces. This
seems to be getting a bit big.

I case you do not believe me here, an acre is what a man can
plough in a day, at least in medieval terms, and is 4840 square yards. 500 by
500 paces is 25000 square paces, which is a far too large an area of the
battlefield.

Now I know that probably the farming would have been in
strips, so the fields would have been bigger, but 50 or so strips seems to be a
bit big.

I have mentioned before the dissonance there is between the
figure scale on out wargames table and the battle scale. The terrain, as I
mentioned there, is the mediator between the two. Buildings, it seems are not
that much of a problem, on the whole you stick to the figure scale. Trees too
are general of the figure scale. Even the hedges I have are the correct scale
for 6 mm figures, being about 8 mm high.

But the area of enclosures seems to be a bit of an issue.

Looking at my rule sets, it seems that most dodge the issue.
An area of enclosures is a set of fields and hedges, and does not need to be
represented accurately on the wargame table because you need to get troops in
and out and so just some representation of hedges or walls is sufficient.

I confess that Polemos: SPQR also dodges the issue,
suggesting that a bit of felt with a few representative hedges on it is
sufficient.

Having tried this out I am no longer so sure. A scattering
of hedges does not look the part, I fear. But a full blown figure scale field
is far, far too big for the ground scale of the table. So I am in a bit of a quandary.

Perhaps I should just experiment until I find something that
looks right, but I fear that all this pondering what we are doing while we
wargame is hitting me. How can I have a game with fields on the table knowing
that the scale of them is wrong, one way or another.

Normally, in a post like this, the last paragraph would be a
stunning resolution of the problem, in this case a visually acceptable method
of representing fields which both looks correct and is a reasonable scale representation
of the ground in the tabletop battlefield.

Not so here, I think.
I am still struggling with this one, so in desperation I as the obvious
question: